Archives for April 2019

Derek Hodgson writes for The Conversation about his theories on the development of writing:

The part of the brain that processes visual information, the visual cortex, evolved over the course of millions of years in a world where reading and writing didn’t exist. So it’s long been a mystery how these skills could appear some 5,000 years ago, with our brains suddenly acquiring the specific ability to make sense of letters. Some researchers believe that the key to understanding this transition is determining how and why humans first began to make repetitive marks.

Recent extensive brain imaging of the visual cortex as people read text has provided important insights into how the brain perceives simple patterns. In my new paper, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports, I analyse such research to argue that the earliest human-made patterns were aesthetic rather than symbolic, and describe what that means for the evolution of reading and writing. […]

In 2000 I first suggested that the way the “early visual cortex” – the location where visual information from the eye first impacts the cortex – processes information gave rise to the ability to engrave simple patterns. We know that this area has neurons coding for edges, lines and “T” junctions. As distilled forms, these shapes preferentially activate the visual cortex. […]

At some point from around 700,000 years ago, this sensitivity to geometry and pattern perception enabled humans to start making refined “Acheulean tools”, which exhibit a certain symmetry. […] The tool making then further promoted an enhanced sensitivity and bias towards patterns in the natural environment, which our ancestors projected onto materials other than the actual tools. For example, they started accidentally making marks on rocks, shells and materials such as ochre. At some point, these unintentional patterns were intentionally copied on such materials – developing into engraved designs and later on into writing.

But how was this possible? Neuroscientific research has shown that writing text involves the premotor cortex of the brain, which drives manual skills. My theory therefore suggests that reading and writing evolved when our passive perception for discerning things started to interact with manual dexterity.

It’s interesting stuff, but I have no way of judging its plausibility, and I invite your thoughts on the matter.

Bathrobe sent me this link with the information that if you paste in a string of symbols it will tell you what each letter is in Unicode. It also gives you other information, and if you click on “Show character notes” it will tell you, among other things, which languages use the symbol. Very cool!

Sabrina A. of Inside North Africa publishes an interview with a scholar of Berber linguistics:

Professor Amina Mettouchi, who holds the Berber Linguistics chair at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, grew up in Azazga, Kabylia until the age of 11 where she left Algeria for France and continued her studies there. She found herself specializing in Berber linguistics, but the path there wasn’t always linear. She started off with math and physics in efforts to become a businesswoman or engineer to please her parent’s wishes, but her true love was for the humanities, so once she graduated from high school she started studying subjects like literature, philosophy, and history. She explains, “My interests then gradually focused on linguistics, and when I started preparing for a Ph.D., my supervisor suggested I work on Berber. I hadn’t thought it was possible at the time, although there were a few doctoral theses on Berber, and some teaching going on. I embraced this opportunity as a way to reconnect with my roots in a way that also allowed me to work on the intricate and mindblowing complexities of the human mind thanks to linguistics. And I haven’t stopped since.” […]

The whole population has to take part in the documentation and preservation of their languages, with linguists acting as consultants and experts on methods and tools. This is why I have started going online, first with the pages on endangered Berber languages on my professional website, then with the Facebook Page Endangered Berber Languages and the Twitter account Langues Berberes en Danger. My aim is first to raise awareness concerning the need to document the Berber languages that are the most threatened, and then to provide methodological help to language activists willing to undertake that mission for their language. My purpose is also to disseminate oral documents where one can hear and see people speaking threatened Berber languages.” Pr. Mettouchi adds that “Unfortunately, such videos are extremely rare,” and the way they are uploaded (without keywords or name of the language or the region in the title for example), “makes it very difficult to trace them online.”

She discusses aspect (“In Kabyle for instance, the same form (e.g. tturarent) can mean ‘they were singing and dancing festively’ (in the past) or ‘they are singing and dancing festively’ now”), language names (“Berber is the term used in the scientific literature on those languages, internationally. Amazigh is fine too as a scientific term but involves a more political perspective. I personally use both, depending on the medium used, and the topic broached”), the diversity of Berber (“This is not only a question of scientific truth, but it is also a trap for Berber languages, to talk about Amazigh as one language because then individual languages die in silence since as long as some speakers of major varieties still speak those varieties, one believes that ‘the language’ is alive and does not involve themselves in documentation and preservation”), and other topics; she has interesting things to say about writing:

For Pr. Mettouchi, the importance of writing is overrated. “It is good to be able to write one’s language, but putting all one’s energies into that, thinking that it is the only way a language can exist and prosper is an illusion, especially in a world that is now more and more digital, and involves images and sounds, more and more. Therefore, I think people should engage more in oral transmission. For instance, whenever it is possible, create kindergartens where children, especially those whose parents do not speak the language anymore, can learn it in a natural way. Not in a Westernized way, with picture books, but naturally, with elders, playing traditional games, including verbal games such as riddles, and listening to folktales, practicing traditional activities etc. Elders should be involved as main teachers for children under the age of 7. After that, children can and will learn how to read in write, in as many alphabets and writing systems as they want, including the various Amazigh scripts. But before reading and writing the language, one needs to speak it and to learn all the wisdom and the values that it conveys, not only through everyday language but also through riddles, folktales, poetry. I think that it is urgent that all over Tamazgha, activists, especially women, create oral tradition kindergartens, where elders, especially women, can pass on the wealth of knowledge they have to young children, in the way transmission used to get done in the old days, through practice. Learning to weave, to make pottery, to cook, to plow, to grow vegetables or palm-trees, to make a fire in the desert, to gather wild herbs, for boys and girls alike, is a wonderful experience through which they can learn their culture and their language together. People often talk about de-colonizing, minds, and cultures, but too often, they don’t realize that the way to decolonization is also through responsible concrete actions like those. They are easy to implement, even in diaspora contexts at a smaller scale, but they are only possible if we think about it in a radically new way, by empowering women, especially older women who still are skilled in traditional activities and language, and by being confident in the value and importance of oral transmission.”

And she says, quite correctly, “Children can learn and speak several languages, it is easy for them, and it is good for them.”

Monica Ellena reported for Eurasianet (a couple years ago, but I just saw it) on the problems faced by minor alphabets in the digital age:

Dato Dolidze’s fingers move slowly on the old handset as he writes a text message to his son. “My phone only has the Latin alphabet, so every time I text I need to translate the Georgian letters into the Latin. It’s a pain,” says the 50-something orange vendor at a Tbilisi vegetable market. While newer smartphones enable the use of the Georgian alphabet, many in Georgia – where the average wage is $333 a month – are, like Dolidze, stuck with cheaper, older phones.

Georgia’s unique alphabet is one of the unintended casualties of such digital compromises. […] “Minor languages are particularly vulnerable today thus need protection,” says Nino Doborjginidze, who heads the Institute of Linguistic Studies at Tbilisi’s Ilia Chavchavadze State University. “A lack of technology development for such languages, including Georgian, in turn, impedes international dissemination of valuable Georgian-language data surviving in different media, oral, manuscript and printed.” […]

Private initiatives have emerged to bolster Georgia’s web presence. In 2015, industrial designer Zviad Tsikolia teamed up with Georgia’s largest lender, TBC Bank, and launched the contest #WriteinGeorgian, calling on volunteers’ creativity to create new styles for the alphabetic characters. Georgians responded enthusiastically, with 160 new fonts submitted in five weeks. […]

Neighboring Armenia faces similar challenges, as it also has a unique language with an alphabet used solely for Armenian. “Transliteration is common, especially among the vast diaspora, but not only,” explains Gegham Vardanyan, editor-in-chief of the media discussion platform media.am. “It is not only the Latin script, Armenians in Russia will communicate in Armenian using the Cyrillic script. The result is just bizarre, often you just cannot understand it.”

The sample font from the #WriteinGeorgian contest shown at the top of the page is gorgeous, if perhaps impractical.

Matt Garrick reports for ABC News of Australia:

It has been used for thousands of years as a way to hunt without scaring your prey, or to recognise cultural silences during mourning or to conduct secret conversations. Now the ancient art of Yolngu sign language is being documented for a landmark resource, to help prevent this rare form of communication from disappearing altogether. The “beautiful volume to give back to the children” is being created by anthropology and linguistics expert Dr Bentley James, in concert with senior Yolngu figures and academics. […]

For the past 25 years, Dr James has been studying sign language on Yolngu country in remote East Arnhem Land. “I found I was drawn to attempting to do something to save Indigenous languages,” he said. His work has entailed living on isolated outstations and in Indigenous communities, learning to speak and sign off patient elders, who have allowed Dr James to write down and document the different words and phrases.

Now, more than two decades since first embarking on his mission, this extensive volume to hand down to future generations is coming to fruition. “We have collected over 10,000 photographs, of that we have managed to get it down to about 2,500, and those will then express the signs. There’s 1,800 signs all up, and we’ve collected about 1,000. But in the book we’re only using 500 of those signs, so those 2,500 photographs [will be] in full colour, sequential photographs showing the hand shapes, and the movement of the arc and the hand signal itself, and the conventions and how it works.” The volume will also contain a learner’s guide and a history of the language, to help people who do not speak Yolngu hand signs to learn how the language works.

Of the 8,000 or so speakers of Yolngu languages in northeast Arnhem Land, Dr James estimated most were still fluent in sign language. But, he said, due to the decline of Yolngu people living on homelands and outstations and instead moving into crowded communities, “they’re not carrying on their behaviours that they did managing country”. “So they’re unable to have opportunity to use sign, there’s not much of the hunting that used to go on going on.” Young people being glued to their phones and indulging in excess screen time was also playing a part in the erosion of sign language, he said.

“Yolngu” can be a confusing term; as Claire Bowern said back in 2005: “Yolngu is used in Armhem Land both for Yolngu people (ie speakers of Pama-Nyungan Yolngu languages) and for Aboriginal people in general.” Thanks, Trevor!

Arafat A. Razzaque writes for the Ajam Media Collective about the history of the Aladdin tale, familiar from the Thousand and One Nights but not originally a part of it. He begins with “arguably the Middle East’s greatest modern adaptation of the 1001 Nights“:

Written by the poet Tahir Abu Fasha (who also wrote songs for Umm Kulthum), the series lasted 26 years on the airwaves, with 820 episodes total. As a child, the Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh would sit “glued to the radio” waiting to hear the captivating Zouzou Nabil, who voiced Shahrazad.

I love that kind of local detail, which you’re unlikely to learn from Western accounts. He continues with a history of the Nights:

The 1001 Nights has a pretty remarkable genealogy. Our oldest documentation of it is an Arabic papyrus from Egypt, reused as scrap with inscriptions dated 879 CE. There was an earlier Persian book called Hazār afsāna (A Thousand Stories) that did not survive. But key elements of the frame story of Shahriyar and Shahrazad were already common in Pali and Sanskrit texts from ancient India, while another Arabic book called One Hundred and One Nights has an alternate version also found in a third-century Chinese Buddhist text of the Tripiṭaka.

The event that sparked the Nights into a modern European phenomenon was its translation by Antoine Galland from a fifteenth-century Arabic manuscript that still remains our principal source. First published in 1704, Galland’s Les Mille et une nuit: Contes Arabes (“1001 Nights: Arabian tales”) was an instant bestseller, mainly because it coincided with the rise of French fairy tales. […]

In Arabic, Alf layla was first printed in India. Known as the “Calcutta I” edition of 1814–18, it was prepared by Shaykh Aḥmad al-Shīrwānī, a teacher of Arabic at the Fort William College in Bengal, where East India Company officials were trained in South Asian languages, especially Persian. Subsequent Arabic editions were published in Breslau, in today’s Poland (by Habicht, 1824–43), in Bulaq, Cairo (1835) and again in India (“Calcutta II,” 1839-42). By the late-nineteenth century, the book was appearing everywhere—a fascinating example being the Judaeo-Arabic edition of 1888 printed in Bombay by Aharon Yaacov Shmuel Divekar, a native Jewish-Indian (“Bene Israel”) who also published prayer books for the city’s Baghdadi Jewish community.

Then he gets to the meat of his piece, the origin of the Aladdin tale:

After nearly a century of speculation, in 1887 the Prussian scholar Hermann Zotenberg who worked as a manuscript curator at the French national library, came across Galland’s archived diaries. There it was revealed that Galland had an oral source, “the Maronite Hanna of Aleppo.” Meeting Hanna Diyab in 1709 through a colleague in Paris was great luck for Galland, since he ran out of stories to translate from available manuscripts. […]

Galland wrote in his journal that he received “the Story of the Lamp” from Hanna Diyab on May 5, 1709. Every few days for the next month or so, Diyab told him fifteen more tales. Ten of these, including Ali Baba, were later published as the last four volumes of Galland’s Nights (1712–17). […] In 1993, a previously unknown autobiography/travelogue by Hanna Diyab was discovered at the Vatican Library. It has now been published in French as of 2015, and though of much broader historical interest, it also offers tantalizing glimpses into how Aladdin and Ali Baba came to be imagined.

I’ll let you discover the rest at the link; there’s all kinds of good stuff, like “A major classic of the Danish Golden Age happens to be an adaptation of Aladdin by Adam Oehlenschläger (1805), set in Isfahan rather than China because Persia was imagined to be the modern, cosmopolitan France of the East.” And I’d never heard of the One Hundred and One Nights; don’t miss the Bruce Fudge interview linked to it above. (We discussed a new, “complete” edition of the Arabian Nights back in 2009.)

A couple of weeks ago I reported on my viewing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris; last week I saw Mirror (still my favorite of his movies), and this afternoon I saw Stalker for the first time. I’d been looking forward to it, both because it’s by Tarkovsky and because it’s based on the novel Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, who wrote some of my very favorite science fiction. Alas, my negative reaction was even stronger than to Solaris — I’m glad I saw it, mind you, and I enjoyed lots of it (it is, after all, a Tarkovsky movie), but to my mind he took a taut, suspenseful, thought-provoking novel and turned it into a long, slow movie that jettisoned most of what made the novel interesting and replaced it with Deep Thoughts about art and life. Now, maybe I just wasn’t in the mood, and maybe I’m not Deep enough to appreciate them, but I found myself twitching in my seat a lot and occasionally having to keep myself from drifting off. (I amused myself by catching errors in the subtitles.) And maybe this is unfair, but instead of the Bach, Pergolesi, and Purcell of his earlier movies he used Beethoven’s Ninth (the Ode to Joy) and (God save the mark) Ravel’s Bolero at crucial moments here. I won’t say poshlost, but the word might have popped into my mind. Sorry, Andrei Arsenievich.

Merrill Perlman (who spent years as a copyeditor, first at The Southern Illinoisan, then The Des Moines Register, and finally The New York Times, and yet has retained sensible ideas about language) describes the new Associated Press Stylebook :

Many editors attending the AP presentation were elated that AP is now allowing the use of “%” with figures instead of requiring “percent.” Instead of “the stock rose 3 percent,” copy that follows AP can now read “the stock rose 3%.” […]

Until now, the AP also advised against transmitting any accents for the same reason. That wall now has a crack: a revised entry allows “accent marks or other diacritical marks with names of people who request them or are widely known to use them, or if quoting directly in a language that uses them.” There is still the caveat that some systems won’t accept them, and it is not blanket permission to use accents on words in English that have them or need them for pronunciation. As the “Ask the Editor” feature says: accents are for “people, not places, things, foods, weather systems or anything else. So, no accent mark in entree, cafe, decor or jalapeno. (Of course, as always, you can do it differently if you choose.)” Yes, Beyoncé, no “résumé.”

Two other small changes to the AP style guide that may have big impact:

Split infinitives are okay! (Er, OK!) The previous entry said: “In general, avoid awkward constructions that split infinitive forms of a verb (to leave, to help, etc.) or compound forms (had left, are found out, etc.” It continued: “Occasionally, however, a split is not awkward and is necessary to convey the meaning.” The new entry says this: “In many cases, splitting the infinitive or compound forms of a verb is necessary to convey meaning and make a sentence easy to read. Such constructions are acceptable.” But: “If splitting a verb results in an awkward sentence, don’t do it.” The myth that splitting an infinitive is somehow wrong is one of the hardest to kill. Perhaps it will now wither.

In another nod to sanity, the AP finally acknowledges that “data” can be singular. For years, the “data” entry said, “A plural noun, it normally takes plural verbs and pronouns,” but acknowledged that “data” could be a singular when regarded as a unit. The new entry says: “The word typically takes singular verbs and pronouns when writing for general audiences and in data journalism contexts: The data is sound. In scientific and academic writing, plural verbs and pronouns are preferred.”

Finally, the AP has also come around to the belief that using “sic” is rarely advised. The old entry called for it to “show that quoted material or person’s words include a misspelling, incorrect grammar or peculiar usage.” But as we’ve said, “sic” “can come off as snarky, giving a sense of “we know better,” at the expense of the original author.”

I’m meh on the “%” issue (6 of 1, half a dozen of the other), but I’m pleased about the accent marks, split infinitives, and singular “data,” and I have to agree that “sic” is often snarky and unnecessary.

Megan Gannon reports for Smithsonian.com:

On April 30, 1828, a Cherokee stickball team stepped into the underworld to ask for help.

Carrying river-cane torches, the men walked into the mouth of Manitou Cave in Willstown, Alabama, and continued nearly a mile into the cave’s dark zone, past impressive flowstone formations in the wide limestone passageway. They stopped inside a damp, remote chamber where a spring emerged from the ground. They were far from the white settlers and Christian missionaries who had recently arrived in northeastern Alabama, putting increasing pressure on Native Americans to assimilate to a Euro-American way of life. (In just a few years President Andrew Jackson would sign the Indian Removal Act that would force the Cherokee off their land and onto the Trail of Tears.) Here, in private, the stickball team could perform important rituals—meditating, cleansing and appealing to supernatural forces that might give their team the right magic to win a game of stickball, a contest nicknamed “the little brother of war.”

This spiritual event, perhaps ordinary for the time but revelatory now, only recently became known because of a set of inscriptions found on the walls of the cave. A group of scholars have now translated the messages, left by the spiritual leader of the stickball team, and describe them in an article published today in the journal Antiquity. Prehistoric ancestors of the Cherokee left figurative paintings inside caves for centuries, but scholars didn’t know that Cherokee people also left written records—documents, really—on cave walls. The inscriptions described in the journal article offer a window into life among the Cherokee in the years immediately before they would be forcibly removed from the American southeast.

“I never thought I would be looking at documents in caves,” says study co-author Julie Reed, a historian of Native American history at Penn State and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. The inscriptions were written in the Cherokee syllabary, a writing system that was formally adopted by the Cherokee just three years prior in 1825. It quickly allowed a majority of the tribe to become literate in their own language, and the Manitou Cave inscriptions are among a few rare examples of historic Cherokee writing recently found on the walls of caves. “Cavers have been going in caves in the Southeast for a really long time, looking for more prehistoric artwork,” says Beau Carroll, the lead author of the study and an archaeologist with the tribal historic preservation office of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. “For you to be able to pick out actual syllabary you have to be familiar with it. I think it’s all over the place. It’s just that nobody’s been looking for it.”

There’s more on the history of the tribe, the syllabary, and the discovery at the link, along with some good photos. Thanks, Trevor!

Alison Flood reports for the Graun on an amazing find:

It sounds like something from Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind and his The Cemetery of Forgotten Books: a huge volume containing thousands of summaries of books from 500 years ago, many of which no longer exist. But the real deal has been found in Copenhagen, where it has lain untouched for more than 350 years.

The Libro de los Epítomes manuscript, which is more than a foot thick, contains more than 2,000 pages and summaries from the library of Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus who made it his life’s work to create the biggest library the world had ever known in the early part of the 16th century. Running to around 15,000 volumes, the library was put together during Colón’s extensive travels. Today, only around a quarter of the books in the collection survive and have been housed in Seville Cathedral since 1552.

The discovery in the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen is “extraordinary”, and a window into a “lost world of 16th-century books”, said Cambridge academic Dr Edward Wilson-Lee, author of the recent biography of Colón, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.[…]

The manuscript was found in the collection of Árni Magnússon, an Icelandic scholar born in 1663, who donated his books to the University of Copenhagen on his death in 1730. The majority of the some 3,000 items are in Icelandic or Scandinavian languages, with only around 20 Spanish manuscripts, which is probably why the Libro de los Epítomes went unnoticed for hundreds of years. It was Guy Lazure at the University of Windsor in Canada who first spotted the connection to Colón. The Arnamagnæan Institute then contacted Mark McDonald at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who passed it on to Wilson-Lee and his co-author José María Pérez Fernández, of the University of Granada, for verification. […]

After amassing his collection, Colón employed a team of writers to read every book in the library and distill each into a little summary in Libro de los Epítomes, ranging from a couple of lines long for very short texts to about 30 pages for the complete works of Plato, which Wilson-Lee dubbed the “miracle of compression”.

Because Colón collected everything he could lay his hands on, the catalogue is a real record of what people were reading 500 years ago, rather than just the classics. “The important part of Hernando’s library is it’s not just Plato and Cortez, he’s summarising everything from almanacs to news pamphlets. This is really giving us a window into the entirety of early print, much of which has gone missing, and how people read it – a world that is largely lost to us,” said Wilson-Lee.